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In “Revolt of the Elites” Lasch connects the “thinking clases’” embrace of social constructivism to their “living in a world of abstractions and images.” This rooting of “postmodern” ideologies in material/mediatic conditions is mainly absent from conservative/IDW critiques./1
This is probably because for a long time conservatives didn’t want to connect something they thought was bad (social constructivist ideology) to something they thought was basically good (the deregulated post-Keynesian hypercapitalism out of which this “artificial world” grew)./2
Now that’s changed somewhat but there’s still an inability to account for how why “postmodern”/social constructivist ideas have spread, which is on display when critics of them fall back on quasi-conspiratorial explanations. Hence the superiority of Lasch’s account./3
What we think of as “postmodern” ideas are the Weltanschauung you’d expect to take hold in an “artificial environment from which everything that resists human control has been rigorously excluded.” The “thinking class” was the vanguard because they inhabited that world first./4
